Around
the world, women are far more likely than men to be poor, ill-housed,
under-educated and victimized by war and discrimination. To help women help
themselves and their communities, the Global Fund for Women, or GFW, a San Francisco-based
organization, gives $8 million a year to support grassroots projects. So far, the GFW has helped to fund community-based
development projects in 167 countries.

The
organization invited some of its current grantees to its recent 20th
anniversary celebration in New York.
Leymah Gbowee, who helped found the Women in
Peacebuilding Networkin her
rural Liberian community in 2001 was among those attending.

After
11 years of civil war that resulted in tens of thousandsof deaths,
talks between President Charles Taylor's government and rebel militia groups
were stalled. To help prod the parties into action, Gbowee and other rural
women staged peaceful demonstrations outside the buildings where negotiations
were being held. And when an agreement was finally reached, the women worked to
hold both sides publicly accountable for their promises.

"If
some appointment in the government went wrong, we were there," Gbowee
recalls proudly. "If disarmament was going wrong, we were there. We were
just all over the place!"

Although
the role of women may seem minimal to some, especially when dealing with
warlords, Gbowee says, "[women] are the conscience."

Gbowee's
first grassroots group led to the formation, in 2006, of the Women Peace and
Security Network-Africa, or WIPSEN.Today, the Global
Fund for Women is helping WIPSEN survey rural women in five West African
countries to determine what they believe will ensure peace and security
in their communities and the region.

"The
U.S. government put billions of dollars into the restructuring of the Liberian
army," she says, "but have they ever stopped to ask the rural women
'What is security to you? Are you interested in having a gunboat or having
another missile launcher in your army?'"

Gbowee
says, for her and many rural African women like her "security means more
health care for my children, a proper education and more schools."

Halfway
around the world, in the South American nation of Colombia, decades of violent
internal conflict have meant horrific levels of sexual violence and displacement
for women. To address both problems, the Global Fund for Women has supported
the launch of the League of Displaced Women,led by
lawyer-activist Patrica Guerrero.

One
of the League's main projects is its so-called "City of Women"
initiative. It's a grassroots project that has trained over 500 internally
displaced women in construction skills, then given them raw materials to build
their own homes and create new communities for themselves and their families.

The
"City of Women" initiative offers one model for effective grassroots
development, but it's also politically innovative, because women who normally
would never own their own property have a place to call their own. And, according to GFW Latin America program
officer Erika Guevara-Rosas, it also helps to prevent domestic violence.
"The women feel empowered to tell their partners 'if violence starts at
home, then you can leave, because this is my place!'"

Global Fund for Women grantees are also
working in Asia, where they have tackled such problems as human trafficking and
the health and safety of factory workers. In Tibet, GFW has partnered with a
yak loan program designed to help elderly nomadic women whom the government has
forcibly resettled in towns to become financially self-sufficient. "It's a very creative and culturally
appropriate strategy they're using," says Dechen Tsering, GFW's program
officer for Asia and Oceania.

Sometimes,
the challenge women must confront in their societies is not poverty or war, butignorance. When Prudence Mabele, a black South African, was diagnosed with HIV-AIDS in the early
1990s, she and others afflicted with the disease were forced to suffer in shame
and silence. Not surprisingly, there
were few medical or social services to help them cope with their disease.

In
1992, Mabele publicly announced her condition, and took her own meager savings
to start the Positive Women's Networkto advocate loudly for AIDS sufferers.

Sande
Smith, the Global Fund for Women's public education director, is inspired by
Mabele's story, which she says can serve as a model for the empowerment of
women everywhere.

"You
can do that, too. You can say 'What is it that I need? What is it that I wish I
had in my community?' Start talking to others, and then act on it! When … you
know that you can make a difference, you become an agent of change, and life
[itself] changes."

Other projects supported by the
Global Fund for Women range from initiatives in education and legal services to
children's health, and the prevention of domestic violence. However, says
Smith, there is one common principle underlying all these efforts. "Women
can't wait for someone else to do for them. So they have to do it for
themselves. And they are creating a world that is going to be good for
everyone."